I found a lead I really liked from several years earlier, and just sort of ... took it. In editorial review, the senior who spent that year as editor had barely wiped the look of horror off his face when I realized "Uh-oh ... he's read that piece too." It was a big archive. Who was I to know?
Then he said to me "I guess you read this some time back and it just sort of stuck in your head ... happens all the time. Don't worry about it ... just re-write it." He may have winked, but my sweet lord, he handed me The George Harrison Defense ... and again, well, I took it.
Look around the web ... it's a big web. Who's gonna know?
Let's take this concept of "Coverweb." It is, as Mike Salvo wrote in our second issue, a new genre of writing, or perhaps even a post-genre style of writing. The whole concept for "Coverweb," though, was developed by a different publication a year earlier. Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, one of the first quality monthly publications available on the web, tossed around the idea of a "Coverweb" and what it might mean as early as December of 1994.
Of course, I was Managing Editor at the time, so maybe it was my idea. I don't
remember (honest). Karen LeFevre claims that "invention is a social act" (and
she's on my dissertation committee, so who am I to disagree?) and the people in
the room at that December staff meeting -- Jason Teague, Lisa Schmeiser, Lee
Honeycutt, and Nick Weaver -- were very social. I think there was beer involved.
Now, none of those people are with CMC
any more -- in fact, Teague and Honeycutt
are also with Kairos -- so I suppose it doesn't really matter any more.
Does it?
Incidentally, I didn't ask John December if I could use the magazine's logo. I hope he doesn't mind -- it is a link to his site, so in a way I'm providing free advertising for him. Yeah, that's it.
Why, just the other day I received this friendly mail from a recent contributor:
Hi Mick,Now, if you've already hurried off to go see, you've doubtless wondered if I've lost my mind. There's nothing there from Kairos! Well, in a way you'd be right ... after a cordial, if somewhat sarcastic (on both sides) e-mail exchange, Mr. Schnell removed an animated GIF images he had ... liberated ... from Kairos space, and has replaced it with his "Please Enter Table of Contents" box. That's fine.You probably get this a lot, but I thought I'd point out a page I found that looks like it's using one of your Kairos animations without permission:
http://bones.med.ohio-state.edu/eric/papers/primer/webdocs.html
Just thought you'd want to know.
But there's something ... familiar ... about the rest of the page and most of Schnell's site. That is, the layout (translation: the HTML code) is precisely that of a standard Kairos bridge page, first developed and designed by Karen Chauss for her award-winning hypertext in our second issue. I did ask Schnell to at least credit Chauss with the design, and to provide a courtesy linkback, but as of this writing, he has apparently not received that e-mail.
In one earlier e-mail to me, Schnell blew off any objections we might have had with the claim that he was developing the website on his own time and received no professional compensation for it. The point, of course, is that Chauss developed the design on her own time, and no one with this journal receives "compensation" ... except of course collegial recognition by peers and TPR committees.
The astute reader will point out that Kairos has itself "borrowed" Ms. Chauss' design for every feature bridge page since our second issue. That is also correct; truth be told, I loved the simplicity of the design, and ran into Karen one day in a computer lab when we both lived in upstate New York, and asked her "Can we use this? It's great." She said "sure" ... and that' all it took.
We all borrow code ... it's a truism that "View Source" is the best way to learn web layout. And I don't mean to necessarily single out Mr. Schnell, who is not alone in borrowing design from this journal unasked. But the web is a social place ... and the simple difference between taking and sharing isn't in the web interface ... it's in the human interface. Asking, crediting, and the (here's the key word) courtesy linkback.
The answer, of course, is "no."
Our unique (as far as we know -- I don't mean to sound like an infomercial) two-pronged publication system sort of ... eludes ... copyrightable form. If you go back to that Chauss bridge (or any other feature we've ever published) you'll see there are two options to start reading: the "Active" version and the "Archived" version.
The Active version stays on the author(s)' website and can be updated, changed, whatever is seen as appropriate as time passes. This can, of course, lead to the inevitable 404ing of some webtexts ... which led us to develop the Archived version, or a copy of the website frozen on the day of publication to reflect precisely what was peer-reviewed and presented from the Table of Contents.
The authors retain all copyright to their texts -- we do ask them to mention Kairos if they re-publish it somewhere, but that is their decision -- and the journal simply retains "Archive rights." That is, once we've published it, we have the right to keep it on whatever server the journal resides, or to remove it at our discretion.
This led to some sticky and uncomfortable moments for us recently, as Matt Kirschenbaum relates elsewhere in this Coverweb.
I really don't have any answers. But the questions sure are interesting, aren't they?
Here's the part buried at the end of the column where I admit that the staff and board and contributors to this journal have made plenty of mistakes in judgment as well. For one of our Coverweb graphics, the artist borrowed and adapted an image from a university website ... sure enough, a reader of the journal noticed and made some noises about legal action. We fixed that.
In another Coverweb, one of our contributors included a copyrighted image of Pamela Anderson Lee without permission ... I remember one of the staff members saying "I kind of doubt the producers of Baywatch read this publication." Hey, it's a big web, right?
We publish tons of edited MOO sessions in our Response Section, Kairos Interactive. We do try to make it clear at the sessions, as they are happening, that the discussion is for publication ... and as of yet, that's been enough. The new "Conversations" section, featuring excerpts from relevant e-lists, also come with reprint permission -- but I wonder, what happens when we get permission to reprint a post from someone who is responding to (and quoting) a post we don't get permission to reprint? Hasn't happened yet. It will.
Many of our book reviews include images of the book covers, some "lifted" from publisher's websites. I'm almost sure -- here comes that phrase again -- that they don't mind the "free advertising," and we make it clear to our contributors that it is their responsibility to obtain permissions ... but these are permissions I, as editor, have never seen. Wonder when that one'll explode in our virtual faces?
Ah, hell. It's all "fair use," right?
The title of our journal comes from a Greek legal term meaning "re-invention of the present occasion," or as Eric Charles White put it, "radical occasionality." (In an interesting spin on copyright and citation, a former member of this journal's staff credited me with the White quote in her dissertation, but I don't think anyone on her committee noticed. Another former member of the staff did, but none of us know White, so ... who's gonna know?)
Anyway, radical occasionality or serendipity, whichever it may be, literally as I was drafting this editorial, I received the following electronic mail message:
